For the about 17 million Small and Medium scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria to survive the current harsh economic situation in the country, VoguePay, an online payment processor, has called for increased government support through an enabling environment.

According to VoguePay, the SMEs remain very crucial to growing the economy because of the enormous job potential they are capable of generating.

While calling for government support, the firm also urged SMEs to be wary of online frauds when doing transactions, stressing that the menace has become rampant lately in the country.

According to the co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of VoguePay, Leke Ojikutu, online fraud has tendency to affect everyone who makes or accepts payments online; partly because it’s easier to steal anonymously and tracking down someone over the Internet and prosecuting them is difficult and almost impossible.

One of the key steps to eliminating online fraud, according to Ojikutu, is to be able to recognize it before a card is charged.

According to Ojikutu, identity theft is a vice of fraud that online payment platforms need to reduce to its barest minimum. This, he said is where VoguePay plays a crucial role to its users as every merchant is unique and has a unique sales history and e-behaviour that the system recognizes and uses to prevent fraud from being carried out on his account.

He mentioned that reports from institutions like Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) and DataGroupIT is helpful in helping to quantify the impact of financial losses due to online fraud, with NDIC reporting over N25.61 billion was lost to fraud in 2014 and DataGroupIT’s recent white paper indicated a more severe impact of N78 billion ($391 million) lost to online fraud in Nigeria each year.